The History of Southampton

Two ships made this city's name and a tide made the city. Everything else — the walls, the docks, the liners, the bombing — follows from the fact that the water here behaves unlike anywhere else on the English coast. The walking tours on guided tours of Southampton cover most of what is described below on foot.

Why a port grew here: the double high water

Southampton does not get one high tide and one low. It gets a long stand of high water, and that is why deep-drafted ships could always come and go here when they could not elsewhere. The port's own hydrographers attribute it to four additional daily oscillations set up in the water between Portland, Cherbourg, Littlehampton and Le Havre, working against the normal twice-daily rhythm.

The popular explanation — that the Isle of Wight gives the Solent two entrances and therefore two tides — is specifically not the reason, and the port says so. The two entrances do produce other effects a mariner cares about: a young flood stand, and an unusually short ebb. It is a genuinely unusual piece of water and it is the foundation of everything that came after.

The walled town, 1202 to the 14th century

Rampart defences were begun around 1202 to 1203 and added to over the next three hundred years. The completed circuit ran 2,200 yards, a little over a mile and a quarter, and carried twenty-nine towers and eight gates. It is one of the more complete medieval town walls in England and roughly half of it is still standing.

The Bargate is the piece everyone knows. Its core is Norman, built somewhere between 1180 and 1200 as a two-storey stone gate tower and the principal northern entrance. In the late 13th century it was extended and largely rebuilt, gaining the two drum towers and the large first-floor hall it still has. The Bargate and the walls together are a Scheduled Monument.

Wool, wine and the French raid

The walls were not decorative. Southampton traded wool out and wine in, which made it rich and made it a target, and the stone rebuilding of the 14th century was a direct response to French attack. What survives on the western side, above what was then the shoreline, is the most intact stretch precisely because it faced the water.

Tudor House on Bugle Street belongs to the prosperous end of that story: a merchant's house with a garden, timbered, and now the city's oldest museum. Its neighbours are God's House Tower and the Westgate, and the three of them are within a few minutes of each other.

The Mayflower, 1620

On 15 August 1620 the Mayflower and the Speedwell sailed from West Quay. The Speedwell leaked, the two ships put back into Dartmouth and then Plymouth, and the Mayflower eventually crossed alone — which is why Plymouth gets the credit and Southampton gets a memorial.

The Mayflower Memorial on Western Esplanade was raised in 1913 to mark it. R M Lucas designed it: a rough stone column on five stepped stages under a domed cupola on slender Ionic columns, with a bronze model of the ship on top. It is Grade II listed and it is a stop on both walking tours.

The age of the liners

The docks that made modern Southampton were built in the 19th century, and by the early 20th the city was effectively a company town for the White Star and Cunard lines. Titanic sailed from here on 10 April 1912 with a crew drawn overwhelmingly from these streets, and four out of five of that crew died. What that did to the city is a story of its own, on the Titanic page.

The liners never entirely left. The port today handles more than 500 cruise calls and three million passengers a year across five terminals, which makes it Europe's leading turnaround cruise port, and the aerial photographs of three ships alongside at once are the direct descendant of the same trade.

The night of November 1940

Southampton was bombed hard, for the docks and for what was being built up the Itchen. Holyrood Church, which had stood on the High Street since the Middle Ages, was burnt out in an air raid in November 1940. The spire and most of the Victorian work went; the tower and the medieval fabric largely held.

It was never rebuilt. It was rededicated instead as a memorial to the Merchant Navy, and it is now a roofless ruin you can walk into on the busiest street in the city. There is a Titanic crew memorial inside it.

Spitfires and the Itchen

The Supermarine Spitfire was designed and first built at Supermarine's works at Woolston, on the east bank of the Itchen, and first flew from Eastleigh aerodrome — now Southampton Airport — on 5 March 1936. It is why the works were a target and it is the piece of the city's history that has the least to show for itself on the ground.

The Spitfire is the part of Southampton's story with the least to show for itself. Supermarine's Woolston works were bombed out in 1940 and never rebuilt on that site, so what you can visit is the airport the aircraft first flew from and the river it was built beside. There is a monument in the city; there is no factory.

The dates in one place

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